Still, India continues to rank extremely low in United Nations’ measures of well-being. India ranked 136 out of 186 countries in the 2012 U.N. Human Development Index and 94 out 119 in the U.N. World Food Programme’s Global Hunger Index.

A new study by the McKinsey Global Institute – the research arm of consulting company McKinsey – says that such a gauge of extreme poverty has its place. But it argues India should focus instead on a more comprehensive measure of what it would take to satisfy a person’s basic needs for food, energy, housing, drinking water, sanitation, healthcare, schooling and social security.

McKinsey calls its new measure an “empowerment line.” It is the level where the report’s authors conclude that India’s citizens can get out of poverty and have the resources to build better lives for themselves, rather than scrape along at subsistence levels. McKinsey set its empowerment line at 1,336 rupees a month – roughly 50% above the government poverty line.

“It’s an expanded definition of poverty and aims to calculate the escape velocity needed to get people sustainably out of poverty,” said Anu Madgavkar, a senior fellow at the institute in Mumbai.

According to McKinsey’s calculations, about 680 million people, or 56% of Indians, now live below the empowerment line. Insufficient and ineffective public programs, poor agricultural productivity and a lack of better jobs all conspire to keep people poor.

McKinsey says that policies to fuel the creation of more non-farm employment and boost agricultural yields, combined with modest state spending increases on critical services and major improvements in the effectiveness of government spending could manage to lift all Indians above the empowerment line by 2022.

Their policy suggestions for India are apt. But the new framework they have devised for assessing poverty can be applied across the developing world.